


feel no glory, feel no pain

by griffenly



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, lmao this hurt like a bitch to write, so enjoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 12:39:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4305447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/griffenly/pseuds/griffenly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He gets into medicine because of Octavia. <br/>He gets into most things because of Octavia, but that’s beside the point. <br/>The point is, it’s her damn fault that he’s in this damn profession, and therefore by extension it’s her fault he has to deal with this fucking idiot every week. </p><p>or, the one where Bellamy is a doctor and Clarke is the girl he stitches up every week</p>
            </blockquote>





	feel no glory, feel no pain

**Author's Note:**

> This was based off an anonymous tumblr prompt, so I hope you all like it.  
> It hurt to write, buy, hey, what doesn't when it comes to these two anymore.

He gets into medicine because of Octavia.

He gets into _most_ things because of Octavia, but that’s beside the point.

The _point_ is, it’s her damn fault that he’s in this damn profession, and therefore by extension it’s her fault he has to deal with this fucking _idiot_ every week.

Never mind that he loves his job. He truly, truly does. But it’s… it’s this one girl, who somehow always stumbles into the ER with blood pouring from some extremity, and she’s surly and quiet and never even flinches, no matter how unrelenting he is. And she’s beautiful, too - this is an _objective_ observation, of course, because he isn’t attracted to his patient, for Christ’s sake. That would be - that would be so many shades of wrong that Bellamy can’t even _count_ them. But she is - beautiful, he means - with that tumultuous blonde hair that looks like a goddamned hurricane every time she walks in through the automatic doors, her eyes that are so blue and yet so haunted he feels as though he can see the ghosts swarming her vision, her petal pink lips that are always pressed into a firm line and only ever move when she’s growling some curse word under her breath as he stitches her back together day in and day out.

The first time it happens, there’s a gash on her arm, deep and gory and he has no clue how the hell this girl could’ve gotten it. He’s seen wounds like this before, of course, but usually from some of the drunken idiots that wander in around four in the morning. Never someone like her, a girl who barely reaches his shoulder. “She won’t say how she got it,” Roma whispers to him as he takes the chart from her hands, and he nods once, eyes flicking between the numbers in front of him to the stoic statue of a girl on the bed.

“Miss… Griffin, is it?” he starts.

She doesn’t even make eye contact with him. “Clarke is fine.”

“Alright, Clarke. How did you get this… cut on you arm, here?” He grabs one of the stools near by and sits down as he gently takes her arm into his hands. He notices she’s shaking. “Clarke? Are you alright?”

“I’ll be fucking _fantastic_ if you could just stitch me up and let me go,” she mutters, and Bellamy is taken aback. He whistles lowly under his breath, but does as instructed, pulling out his necessary tools and beginning to clean and then stitch up her arm. She doesn’t cringe, or grimace, or even make any noise, to the point that Bellamy finds himself glancing up at her every so often to make sure she’s still breathing or awake or anything. It takes him ten stitches, and by the time he’s done, the girl has relaxed marginally; her shoulders are slumped ever-so-slightly, and there’s a dejected tint to her eyes that wasn’t there before, that was hidden beneath all of the fire and hardened stone lining her expression. He gives her a small smile, taking off his gloves and throwing them into the trash bin as he begins talking again.

“You need to be more careful with whatever caused this,” he tells her, gesturing to the now-bandaged wound. “That was a pretty serious cut, so it’s going to need at least a week or more to heal.” The girl - Clarke - nods once and slips from the bed without another word.

Bellamy stares after her for ten minutes before Roma calls his name with a puzzled furrow in her brow.

The second time it happens is _not_ a week or more later, it’s four days, and along with ripped stitches she now has a cut along her eyebrow.

He raises an eyebrow when he sees her, taking the same seat he had occupied just a few days earlier, and puts on his gloves and readies his equipment. “Funny,” he says, “I could have _sworn_ I told you you needed at least a week of rest before you did anything stupid again.”

“You never said anything _stupid_ ,” she mutters back, and it brings a smile to his lips, at least. He cleans both wounds and starts fixing up the stitches on her arm, and that’s when he sees them - a smattering of bruises just below her jawline, colored purple and blue and a sickly yellow. And once his eye has caught those, there’s more: across her collarbone, along the skin of her back before disappearing into the racerback tanktop she’s wearing, scars marring the skin of her thighs. He stops his work slowly, gaze traveling over her body and back to her face, and maybe she sees the horror there, or the confusion, because she bites her lip and glances down to where his eyes had last landed - on her thighs - and she just shrugs. “Long story,” she supplies. When she doesn’t continue, Bellamy picks up his needle and thread once more, and he finishes the stitches on her arm. He doesn’t want to push her if she isn’t ready.

(He reminds himself to mention it to Octavia, to see if maybe there’s something more going on here.)

Her eyebrow only takes about two stitches, and so by the time it’s all said and done, she has twelve new stitches in her body. He pats her leg gently, but he doesn’t miss the flash of pain that cross her face, however briefly, and it makes him stiffen. “Clarke, seriously,” he says quietly, willing her to meet his eye although she staunchly refuses. “You need to be more careful. I don’t know…” He pauses and clears his throat, because he thinks of his mother, of the scars mangling her heart and body, of the men that beat and bloodied her. (And, _okay_ , maybe Octavia is right about the fact that he has a bit of a protective streak.) “I don’t know what is causing this to happen to you, but if you’re in a situation that’s - “

“I appreciate the concern, Doc,” Clarke snarls, standing and clenching her hands into fists by her side, “but I can take care of _myself_.”

He takes her in, all that blonde hair and anger boiling beneath the surface, a fire she’s trying so hard to put out but she hasn’t quite learned how. He remembers being like that, too, when he was a kid, and… and she’s _not_ a kid. She’s twenty-seven, she _can_ , technically, take care of herself. And he doesn’t know her. He knows absolutely nothing about this girl, and yet he sees the anguish carved into her bones and he wants so badly to help her. And so, with no malice, and a tone that’s eerily calm, he says, “Maybe you can’t.”

He watches her stiffen, and her eyes raise slightly, but they still refuse to meet his - she simply glances at his name tag and murmurs, “I’ll see you around, Dr. Blake,” before disappearing out the doors and into the cold October air.

He has to shake his head and stop himself when he thinks about how cold she must be, in just a thin tank top and shorts.

_Focus, Blake. Focus._

* * *

 

And that’s how it begins.

She comes in at least once a week, sometimes more. Always with new bruises and occasionally with cuts that require stitches. She doesn’t really look at him, but she _talks_ now, and he talks too, and sometimes he finds himself telling her things that definitely violate patient-doctor code, or whatever. But their relationship is weird to begin with, he rationalizes. He’s not _really_ her doctor, just some guy that stitches her up when she gets herself into bad situations. So he tells her about Octavia, one day, about the way he’d had to put both of them through college on his own since his mom had died when he was eighteen and Octavia was twelve. He tells her about how his sister, “who’s barely your height, by the way, and weighs about ninety pounds,” he says with a quirk of his lips, wanted to be a cop so badly she signed up for the Academy without even telling Bellamy until she’d gotten in.

“She sounds badass,” Clarke says.

He’s stitching up a cut just above her knee, this time, and he grins up at her. “You remind me a lot of her, actually.” Clarke’s eyes jerk up to his own, and it takes him a full five seconds to realize she’s never _actually_ made eye contact with him before. Her eyes are blue, blue like the Gulf, blue like the sky on a particularly warm day. There’s a spark in them, too, that seems to have fizzled but not quite died out yet, and there’s also something brokenly beautiful in the look she’s giving him, at that moment, that makes his breath catch.

“Really?” she asks.

He turns back towards her stitches and says, “Yeah. Why does that surprise you?”

She clears her throat, and his eyes flit back towards her again. Clarke is playing with her hands in her lap, picking at the skin around her thumbnail. Her voice is soft and watery when she speaks, and he wonders when she was last this vulnerable with someone, when she let the heavily-guarded walls of her heart tumble just the slightest bit. “It’s just,” she begins, “no one has ever… ever thought of me as strong or _brave_ or… _badass_ before.”

Bellamy scoffs, and she glances up at him again, biting her split lip. She looks like a broken little girl right now, with her hair pulled away from her face and her eyes wide and innocent and _hurting_ , and it does things to him. Things that he does _not_ need to be thinking about, especially when it comes to this girl - this girl he’s known for barely a month, at this point, this girl whose relationship with him consists of her getting beat up and him picking up the pieces. “You realize you come into my ER every week with new cuts and scrapes and bruises that would make grown _men_ cry, and you don’t even _flinch_ when I stitch you up?” She stares at him, and he gives her a small smile. “That sounds pretty badass to me.”

Clarke smiles at him - _really_ smiles, and it’s the first time she’s ever done it, the first time she’s looked at him with anything more than a thin-lipped glare, and it lights up her whole face. She looks like the fucking sun, with that golden hair and pale skin and brillantine smile, and he wants to take a picture of this moment to stow away for safekeeping, to remember _this_ version of her.

As she gets up to leave, he says, “Wait one sec,” and then grabs a pen and scratch piece of paper and scribbles his phone number onto it. He hands it to her with a sheepish grin, and she takes it slowly, her brow furrowing in confusion. “In case… in case you need anything.”

She smiles again, and it was totally, _totally_ worth it.

It’s a few days later that he gets a text from an unknown number, with a screenshot of some chemical reactions and the words “HELP ME!!!!!” beneath it. He stares at the text for five whole minutes before another one dings in right underneath: “oh, this is clarke, btw.”

Bellamy smiles.

* * *

 

They’ve been sort-of-kind-of- _basically_ friends for two and a half months, with them exchanging texts every day and her stumbling in to get fixed up multiple times a month, and Bellamy realizes he still has no fucking idea why she winds up in the ER every week. They’ve told each other a lot of things, it feels like - he’s told her about O, about their mother, about what a shitshow med school was, about his friends (Miller and Murphy), and about O’s friends (Raven and Monty and Jasper). He’s told her about some of the staff, how psychotic they are: “Roma followed me around for a week after we broke up,” he had lamented to her, and he’d watched as her shoulders shook with silent laughter. “A fucking _week_.” He’s told her lots of things, and yet - yet he still feels as though he doesn’t know her, know anything about _her_.

And somehow he also still gets that feeling in the pit of his stomach when she walks in, sometimes on steadier legs than others, with a shrug and a few new cuts for him to suture.

They’re at Octavia’s new apartment one night, she and Lincoln making dinner in the kitchen while Bellamy and Miller are seated at the table with their respective beers and Monty and Jasper are playing some new video game on the brand new TV in the living room.

Octavia calls from the kitchen, “Bell, have you told Miller about your new girlfriend?”

"O, I swear to _God_ \- "

“Oh, the blonde chick? No worries, he talks to me _plenty_ about _her_ ,” Miller calls back with a wink.

Bellamy groans. “I hate you both. And she’s not my girlfriend.”

"Yeah. you’ve just been obsessing about her for two months.”

“I have not been _obsessing_ , why the _fuck_ \- "

“Bell, why don’t you just ask her out?” Octavia asks calmly, leaning her hip against the counter and crossing her arms over her chest. “You obviously really like this girl, and - "

“O, I don’t know anything _about_ her.”

“You said you talk all the time.”

“Yeah, but… but about stupid things. About every day things.”

“That’s a good start,” Octavia tries, but Bellamy simply shakes his head.

“ _Drop it_ , O.”

Octavia sighs and exchanges a look with Miller that Bellamy most certainly does _not_ miss, before shuffling back off to the kitchen. Miller glares at him for long enough that Bellamy groans again and says, “ _What_ , Miller?”

“You’re being stupid.”

“I am not.”

“Are too.”

“Am not.”

“And you call _us_ the immature ones,” Monty yells over the video game.

Bellamy snorts and runs a hand over his face, taking a swig from his beer. “Miller… I just…” He sighs. “I barely know her. We do talk all the time, and I’ve told her a lot about my life, but every time I get close to cracking her insanely-tall walls, she avoids the question. She changes the subject. It’s impossible.”

“Not _impossible_ ,” Miller taunts, and Bellamy kicks him under the table. “Seriously, man. If you really care about this girl… make it happen.”

Octavia chooses that moment to bring out the spaghetti and garlic bread, and so all talk of Bellamy’s love life is extinguished with the meal.

But it’s only a few days later - three, if he’s being honest, because _yeah_ , he counts the days until he sees her because he’s a _fucking_ moron - that his phone rings at four in the morning, and Clarke’s name is scrawled across the screen, and he shoots up so fast he fumbles twice before he actually answers it. “Hello?”

“B-Bellamy?” Her voice is croaky, and it sounds like she’s having trouble breathing, her words tumbling out in a staccato rhythm.

“Clarke? Are you okay?” He sits straight up in bed, already looking around for his jeans. He wonders why his heart feels like it’s beating out of his fucking _chest_ right now, why he can barely breathe himself, hearing her struggling on the other line.

“I… I need y-you to come g-get me,” she manages.

“Okay. Okay, I’m coming. Where are you?” She hesitates, and so he repeats the question, slowly. “Clarke? Where are you?”

“I’m at… at 108 Highgrove,” she whispers, and he almost drops the phone.

 _There’s this fighting ring there_ , O had told him once in a rage, _and every damn time we try and shut it down, it starts back up again. It’s fucking dangerous there, Bell. People die all the damn time, and they don’t… they don’t_ care.

“I’m on my way,” he whispers.

He’s out the door two minutes later.

* * *

 

 

The drive is frantic, and he knows the spot easily, because he’s had to pick O up from there before after a raid ( _I didn’t want to wake Lincoln, and I knew you’d be on night shift_ , she always claimed, but he sort of knew - knew that she wanted her big brother, in the aftermath of that).

And so he drives like he’s got the cops on his ass, because he doesn’t know what happened and he doesn’t _want_ to know, really. All he wants is to make sure Clarke is alive and safe and in his car in the next fifteen minutes before he fucking herniates all over the damn place.

He pulls in to the address, and it looks abandoned, save for the five or six cars that are parked outside. Bellamy practically sprints into the building, following the voices and shouts he can hear below. He finds the door to the basement and wrenches it open. It smells like death and alcohol and stale cigarette smoke, and there’s at least thirty people down there, mostly beefed up guys with tattoos circling their biceps, guys with grisly scars marking their faces like bizarre battle medals. He scans the crowd, looking for that trademark hair, but she’s so tiny and these people are fucking _massive_ and -

And then he sees her, curled into the fetal position on the ground, her phone loosely held in her hand. Everyone is ignoring her, looking away from her, as if she isn’t half-dying right in front of them.

Bellamy rushes over, gently tilting her face to look at him. “Clarke? Hey, Clarke, it’s me, it’s Bellamy,” he whispers, and she lets out a half-choked sob.

“B-Bellamy - "

“I know. I know.” He slides an arm beneath her knees and the other around her neck and slowly lifts her from the ground. She’s light, so light, as though she could drift away on the wind if he just let her. “I’m going to take care of you, okay? I’ve got you.”

“Y-you’ve g-got me,” she whispers back, and it brings a tiny smile onto his lips.

He shoves his way through the throng of people who are circled around the next fight and back up the stairs into the cool December air. He tucks her into the backseat of his car, laying her down gently and taking off his coat to pillow her head.

He drives.

He drives, and he drives, and he doesn’t know where the fuck he’s even going until he’s reached the hospital. He parks in his spot and carefully extricates Clarke from the car, carrying her through the doors to the ER. Harper is working tonight, and she takes a moment to register that it’s him carrying the broken girl through the doors. “I’ve got her,” he says, and when Harper makes a move to help he repeats firmly, “I’ve _got_ her.” Harper nods and backs away, pointing wordlessly to an empty room.

He sets Clarke gently on the bed, turning to close the door and shutter the blinds. “Clarke? Hey, hey, look at me.” He tilts her chin up with his index finger so that her watery eyes meet his, and he whispers, “I need you to tell me what happened so I know how to treat you.”

She nods and swallows heavily, and he helps her sit upright in the bed. “He… h-he, uh, he hit me about… a-about three? Three times? In the stomach, and he, h-he…” She trails off, the sobs wracking her body again, and Bellamy moves onto the bed, tugging her into his lap. She buries her face in his shoulder as he strokes her hair and murmurs nonsense syllables to her, and he fucking _hates_ the way his throat is constricting right now, hates the fact that this girl has been doing this to herself for… for God knows how long, honestly. How many times did she simply not come to the ER? How many times did she come when he wasn’t on duty?

“Clarke,” he whispers, and he wonders how they got _here_ , how she is able to discern so much from just her name, hesitantly murmured into the wild mane of her hair. Because she does understand, he knows. She sits up slightly, rubbing at her eyes gingerly.

She sits up, and she looks him in the eye, and she takes a deep breath, and finally, _finally_ , he gets an explanation.

“My… my dad died six months ago,” she starts, and he can hear the brokenness still permeating her voice, the pain that lingers from a wound she hadn’t learned how to heal yet. “It was complicated, and my mom… she was involved, somehow. She was the _reason_ he died.” Clarke takes a deep, calming breath, and continues. “And then… then a month later, my best friend Wells was shot in a mugging gone wrong, and I… and I just felt _nothing_. I was so numb, and so empty, and I wanted to be strong, too. I wanted to be able to take care of myself.”

“And so you started going to the ring,” Bellamy says quietly, and she just nods.

“And it fucking _sucked_. I have so many bruises and scars, but… they taught me how to protect myself. How to be strong again. And the only… the only time I could feel anything was when I was hurt, and it…” She sighs, and she averts her gaze. “It felt _good_ , to feel something again. And I didn’t have anyone around, anymore, to care that it looked like I was getting run over by a bus every goddamned night, I didn’t have anyone to _stop_ me.” Clarke glances back up at him, her head quirked to the side and so much emotion in her eyes that it nearly knocks him breathless. There are tears traipsing down her cheeks in uneven, messy lines, and her hair is untamed around her face, and she’s got a split lip and dozens of cuts and bruises marring her features and yet - yet she looks so fucking _beautiful_ it makes him ache. “But then I met you, Bellamy, and you… you _cared_. You didn’t even know me, and you cared. I didn’t have a single person to stop me… until you,” she finishes.

“Clarke…”

“I didn’t want it to hurt anymore,” Clarke whispers, and her voice breaks at the last syllable. “I was so _tired_ , Bellamy. I wanted to feel okay again. I wanted to feel something other than this pain. And with you - with you, I felt whole again. Like I wasn’t a girl who turned people to ash the minute I touched them. I felt like a person. I don’t… I don’t want that to go away.”

He stares at her, eyes flitting between hers, trying to find the meaning in her gaze. Her eyes were screaming at him, _pleading_ with him, to simply decipher the words she was leaving dangling between the lines.

_Until you._

_Make it happen._

(Bellamy never much cared for words.)

And so he leans forward and touched his lips to hers.

(It tastes like blood and smoke and of broken pieces fitting back together.)

(It tastes a lot like a beginning.)


End file.
